How can forums compete with Reddit?
Friday, December 25, 2020 by Frogboy | Discussion: Everything Else
I'll be honest with you. I spend a lot of time on Reddit.
One can see a direct correlation between the rice of Reddit (and to a lesser extent Twitter and Facebook) and the fall of blogs and forums.
And I think that's a shame because the nice thing about forums is that you get to know the regulars and there are many nice features on forums that Reddit doesn't have.
Still, the UI on many forums, including ours, is not as good as I'd like to see. Which makes me wonder, what would it take to make forums more competitive to Reddit? What would they need for you to come visit more?
One reason I ask is that over the next 18 months Stardock is going to be releasing a lot of stuff and we'd like to get our forums in shape to hopefully offer a fun and useful place to spend time at.
In 2020, we did a number of behind the scenes updates that regulars might have noticed (for instance, the entire backend got a huge upgrade making everything much faster). But there's a lot of UX stuff that we don't have a consistent opinion on which shows.
So we're asking you, what are 5 things you would do to these forums that would make you and other more inclined to visit?
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Reply #22 Saturday, February 13, 2021 12:27 AM
I don't have much experience with reddit. I don't go there often.
However, I did see a migration from a forum to discord. It was a problem not helped by when the devs discontinued support for the forum and made an official discord channel. It was the forum for a TTRPG called Eclipse Phase.
Here is a link if you are interested in taking a look:
https://eclipsephase.com/forum
I think a forum needs both a community, and decent support from the hosts and moderators. If you lack a community, then having a forum is pointless. If you have a community but no support, then there is a risk that something will break or a trouble maker will show up and make things a less fun experience.
Reply #23 Tuesday, February 16, 2021 1:08 AM
if you really think about it.. reddit is just basically a giant forum, one where replies are displayed in a way that tracks a conversation easily.
just imagine any forum being visited by any and everyone, hundreds and thousands of replies. normal forum can't really keep track of quotes and what not, especially if you have say 50 pages of replies and 30 of them are just 2 guys talking across each other.
obviously that doesn't really make anyone go to forum or reddit. almost any rando can start a sub and essentially their own forum for free, in a giant hub. your average forum can be thought of as a sub, "isolated" from everything else. that's the difference. what you do to attract traffic after that would be key to how many people visit the place. you can have a sub with no traffic, even though it's on reddit.
Reply #24 Tuesday, February 16, 2021 9:36 AM
if you really think about it.. reddit is just basically a giant forum, one where replies are displayed in a way that tracks a conversation easily.
That might be a useful feature for forums. Make it so when you're viewing a subject, you can switch it from chronological reply mode, to threaded reply mode. being able to pick between them might be useful. Kind of like when threaded newsreaders were created for Usenet.
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Reply #21 Monday, February 8, 2021 9:34 AM
^ Well put.